The poll's findings – released on Wednesday – soon went viral on the internet, where they became the butt of many jokes, not least among Singaporeans themselves. "Singapore ranked most emotionless country in the world – not sure how to feel about that," ran a number of Singapore-based tweets. "That [poll] is a lie," commented one reader on the online news portal Today. "I use many emoticons to express how satisfied I am."

Over here we ranked most emotional. Would you care to trade a wee bit of prosperity for a boatload of emotion?

__________________
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”

The Hakka walled village may be seen as roughly analagous to the underlying architecture envisaged by Singapore's founding statesmen. Loosely speaking, the traditional Hakka family could be described as a commercially militarised patriarchy, (everyone works, no one quits), run along defensive lines. This comparison clearly has its limits and is meant only to convey an impression formed by the author of this post.

Quote:

Hakka walled villages can be constructed from brick, stone, or rammed earth, with the last being the most common. The external wall is typically 1 metre in thickness and the entire building could be up to three or four stories in height. Often turrets were also built to extend the range of defensive power and to cover otherwise indefensible points. Battlements were also constructed on the top floor for muskets. The gate was the most vulnerable point and it was usually reinforced with stone and covered with iron. A number of smaller gates followed, in case the outer one was breached. With the exception of a few excessively large forts, Hakka houses usually only had one entrance. The round shape of the walls, which became popular in later stages, added to the defensive value of the fortifications and reduced the firepower of artillery against it. A Hakka fort could withstand a protracted siege, since it was well stocked with grains and had an internal source of water. They often also had their own sophisticated sewage systems. (Hakka Walled Village - wikipedia)

China is at a crucial point today, as it was in 1978, when the market reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping opened its economy to the world – and as it was again in the early 1990’s, when Deng’s famous “southern tour” reaffirmed the country’s development path. Throughout this time, examples and lessons from other countries have been important. Deng was reportedly substantially influenced by an early visit to Singapore, where accelerated growth and prosperity had come decades earlier. Understanding other developing countries’ successes and shortcomings has been – and remains – an important part of China’s approach to formulating its growth strategy.

Philippines Is World’s Most Emotional Country, While Neighboring Singapore Doesn’t Feel Much of Anything Anymore by Juli Weiner

According to several maps, the world’s most emotional country and the world’s least emotional country are in shocking geographic proximity to each other, separated only by the South China Sea. Is this body of water the cause of the pathos disparity? In other words, is the South China Sea gas-lighting the Philippines and being totally normal to Singapore? In an attempt to solve this troubling psychodrama, we sat the three of them down for group therapy.

It is interesting to observe how Europe's greatest revolutionary, Karl Marx (1818-1883), thought about China's greatest revolution in the nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). We might imagine that this relentless advocate for underclass interests might have cheered for the poor peasants of the Taiping Heavenly Army. But this was not the case. Marx wrote about the Taiping Rebellion several times in the New York Daily Tribune and other newspapers, and his analysis and his sympathies are fascinating. His articles are as close to blog postings as one could get in the middle of the nineteenth century; they are topical, opinionated, and pretty revealing about his underlying assumptions.

Less than 20 miles from Singapore's skyscrapers is a completely different set of high-rise towers. Much smaller in scale but with a big ambition, over 100 nine-meter tall towers at Sky Greens vertical farm offer a new vision of urban sustainability. Green vegetables like bak choi and Chinese cabbage are grown, stacked in greenhouses, and sold at local supermarkets.

I remember it well. Piazza San Marco, summer of '69, a bucolically porcine gondolier yells at me to get the blankety blank off his gondola which I've been horsing around on. An emotional moment.

'First encounter' with Portugal, a visit to then sleepy Malacca in the early seventies. Interesting cannons.

Quote:

In April 1511, Afonso de Albuquerque set sail from Goa to Malacca with a force of some 1200 men and seventeen or eighteen ships. They conquered the city on 24 August 1511. After seizing the city Afonso de Albuquerque spared the Hindu, Chinese and Burmese inhabitants but had the Muslim inhabitants massacred or sold into slavery.

It soon became clear that Portuguese control of Malacca did not also mean they controlled Asian trade centred there. Their Malaccan rule was severely hampered by administrative and economic difficulties. Rather than achieving their ambition of dominating Asian trade, the Portuguese had disrupted the organisation of the network. The centralised port of exchange of Asian wealth had now gone, as was a Malay state to police the Straits of Malacca that made it safe for commercial traffic. Trade was now scattered over a number of ports among bitter warfare in the Straits.

The Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier spent several months in Malacca in 1545, 1546, and 1549. In 1641, the Dutch defeated the Portuguese in an effort to capture Malacca, with the help of the Sultan of Johore. The Dutch ruled Malacca from 1641 to 1798 but they were not interested in developing it as a trading centre, placing greater importance to Batavia (Jakarta) on Java as their administrative centre. However they still built their landmark, better known as the Stadthuys or Red Building.

Malacca was ceded to the British in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 in exchange for Bencoolen on Sumatra. From 1826 to 1946 Malacca was under the rule of the British, first by the British East India Company and then as a Crown Colony. It formed part of the Straits Settlements, together with Singapore and Penang. After the dissolution of this crown colony, Malacca and Penang became part of the Malayan Union, which later became the Federation of Malaya and eventually Malaysia. (Wikipedia - Malacca)

Why, after more than a decade, does the idea of “vertical farming” keep gathering momentum? Why hasn’t it collapsed under its own weight of illogic? And why is media coverage of vertical farming almost universally positive, often enthusiastically so?

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised when a fantasy persists and thrives despite being unrealistic; after all, that’s what fantasies do. And the vertical-farming concept, unlike, say, creationism, aims at worthy goals. But when a pipedream comes to be regarded, wholly uncritically, as a means of fixing our broken food system, it becomes a dangerous distraction.

Out here in Kansas, for example, farmers and agribusinesses often back up their resistance to much-needed systemic change by claiming that America’s urban-suburban majority has no understanding of what it takes to produce food. And when they learn that city people are wanting to stack fields of crops one above the other, you can be sure that their convictions are reinforced.

Singapore Polytechnic students will now have state-of-the art facility to learn how to handle realistic cyber security scenarios. The Cyber Wargame Centre, the first of its kind to be based in a tertiary institution, was official opened on Thursday. The centre will be used mainly by students in the school's diploma in Infocomm Security Management course. There are four labs where students will learn how to attack and defend networks, analyse malware systems and investigate cyber security problems.

Last Year's Man has written a great response, The Human Desire for Order, to my previous post on Hak Nam, where he reminds us not to romanticize the uninhibited, unorganized growth of anarchic space (Republican free market ideology?), and remember order is natural, safe, and makes creativity possible (Democratic government intervention?). He uses the idea of Chinese Hakka architecture as an example of good space. Beautiful.

[...]

Not to be suspicious of everything 'made in China', but unfortunately, with my dystopian bent, the fist thing that came to my mind was Bentham / Foucault's Panopticon:

"The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example ...

... the design was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and its pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the army, the school, the hospital and the factory have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon."

While uninhibited, unorganized growth is certainly a feature of nature itself, in human hands, the results tend to be less than ideal. I grew up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, and it's hard to imagine a more perfect realization of the American ideal of decentralization. Yet far from a paradise of individualism and undefined creativity, the surroundings have produced only more conformity, more pressure to succumb to pressure from the top. New York on the other hand, with its rectangular grid, strict zoning, and centuries old neighborhoods has always been a beacon of diversity and eccentricity, place where citizens feel comparatively empowered and motivated to take action (it's hard to imagine neighborhood residents in Texas coming together to stop construction on an apartment complex. I don't even think there's a mechanism for them to voice their complaints). Like the human skeleton, the arranged streets provide a vessel for living tissue.

This leads me to believe that artists may have been looking at order in the wrong way. For better or worse, a majority of human beings have an aversion to violence (at least in their immediate person) and an impulse to group together. We are happy when we are at peace with our environment and free of stress from outside sources. You could even go as far as to say that the only way humans can achieve this sense of freedom from coercion is by being organized enough that the power of these outside influences is checked. In this way, one card argue that laws protect freedom, not encroach on it, by constraining the actions of people who hold power.

The same goes with regards to creativity. We often assume that systems exert a force that negates creativity. This is not necessarily the case. Systems can be used to refine and strengthen creativity. The great mistake that many without creativity have made, and the one which is the true source of annoyance for those who have it, is not to say that systems and creativity can coincide but that systems can be used to generate it.

Great art often comes from the most boring of places. Markets free of regulation have done little to encourage the diversification of business. These statements are at once paradoxical and ,in my opinion , indisputable. I wonder if we would have enjoyed meeting the people who actually lived inside the walls of Hak Nam.

HONG KONG - In Western lore, there is no creature more reviled than the snake. After all, this scaled, slimy, slithering reptile is responsible not only for frightening rattles and poisonous bites. For those who follow the Judeo-Christian tradition, the wily serpent is also accountable for no less than the Fall of Man.

Not so in Chinese culture. So, when the Year of the Snake commences on February 10, there will be a week-long celebration across China featuring fireworks, parades, lion dances, offerings to the gods and a gluttonous array of food, including - you guessed it - snake.